CLA portion of ubuntu.com/legal is misleading

[Adam Conrad]

At http://www.ubuntu.com/legal the link to the CLA page says "Details of the agreement you need to send to us before you begin contributing to Ubuntu.", which is entirely untrue. Most Ubuntu contributions do not require signing the CLA at all.

It should instead say something a bit more wishy-washy like "Details of the agreement you need to send to us before you contribue to certain Canonical projects." with a link to http://www.canonical.com/projects/directory which details what those projects are.

Similarly, while http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/contributors is worded a bit better and contains the above link, it might still be nice to make it more explicit by replacing "and we’re required to have agreements with everyone who takes part" with "and we’re required to have agreements with everyone who takes part in those projects". It makes that sentence read a bit redundantly, but also makes it crystal clear that we don't require the CLA for *all* contributions, only contributions to those specific projects.

[Anthony Dillon (ya-bo-ng)]

Adam,

Thank you for taking the time to make us aware of this issue. We will consult legal and reply shortly.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Adam is correct, more accurate wording would be:

"Several upstream projects require all contributors to agree on the
rules for inclusion of their code, we encourage Ubuntu members to
support those when working with the upstream on contribution of patches
back to those projects or direct contributions. For most projects at
Canonical, the preferred approach is a wide license rather than an
assignment of ownership, and the agreements are documented here. Other
projects take their own view but we typically recommend supporting their
preferred approach to contribution and licensing, whatever that might be."

Mark

[Peter Mahnke (peterm-ubuntu)]

From Andrew Sinclair:

It would work to replace the intro paragraph with Mark's proposal. Here it is with a marker for the link and one minor change ("documented here" changed to "documented below").

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Several upstream projects require all contributors to agree on the rules for inclusion of their code, we encourage Ubuntu members to support those when working with the upstream on contribution of patches back to those projects or direct contributions. For most [http://www.canonical.com/projects/directory projects at Canonical], the preferred approach is a wide license rather than an assignment of ownership, and the agreements are documented below. Other projects take their own view but we typically recommend supporting their preferred approach to contribution and licensing, whatever that might be.
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On that page, we should also change from "When you’re ready to contribute to Ubuntu" to "When you're ready to contribute to a project at Canonical".

Also, we should make this change to http://www.ubuntu.com/legal
"Details of the agreement you need to send to us before you begin contributing to projects at Canonical."